


Eldest

by RaisingCaiin



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: M/M, i hate the piped tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-25
Packaged: 2018-08-10 22:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7863658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaisingCaiin/pseuds/RaisingCaiin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maedhros wonders about what it truly means to be the eldest. Fingon doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eldest

“Have you ever considered what it means to be family?”

“Ugh. The mood has been killed.” Fingon rolled away, coming to a stop stretched out on his back in the grass and throwing an arm over his eyes for good measure, as if to ensure that his displeasure was clear. “The mood is dead, Nelyo, as dead as I most certainly will be. Dead of desire, you might ask, dead of longing? Ai, I could only dream of a demise so benign. Mostly, I am just dead of bad timing.” He had been lying atop Maedhros when the question was posed.

“I am sorry for all the death I have unwittingly dealt, but it is a serious question.” Bereft of his warm blanket of cousin, Maedhros rolled onto his side, propping an elbow into the young grass and leaning his head on his hand to survey the muttering Fingon.

“Serious enough to merit interrupting an otherwise most pleasant afternoon? The one free afternoon we are likely to have for weeks?” The words were sputtered from beneath the outflung arm. “Ai, Nelyo, I doubt anything short of Moringotto’s own intrusion into the day could be serious enough to merit such gravity, or indeed any interruption.”

Maedhros smiled at Fingon’s dramatic pose and overblown complaints. “Well, if I am allotted a moment to explain myself, and you are allotted a moment to consider and then rebut my explanation, we might then continue on with the afternoon that you mourn so prematurely.”

Fingon lowered his arm, his eyes flashing, undoubtedly to make a dirty and not-entirely-correct joke on ‘rebut,’ so Maedhros proceeded hastily.

“I overheard Atar complaining again, this morning. Something about how your father did not understand or keep to his proper place in the family line.”

His arm back over his eyes, Fingon snapped his mouth shut, but only for a moment. Maedhros spared that moment to be glad he had thought not to mention the details of that particular overheard conversation – if such a one-sided diatribe, interspersed with Nerdanel’s half-hearted attempts to broker peace, could even be counted as conversation.

“Well,” Fingon began, mulishly: “your father certainly does not seem to understand the concept of family. No wonder you are confused.”

“Peace, peace,” Maedhros said quickly, dropping his head from his hand and crawling the few feet across the grass to drop at Fingon’s side. Once there, though, he did not lie prone across the ground as Fingon did: instead, he lay on his belly, spreading his elbows out and cupping his chin in his hands. “I did not intend for our fathers’ fights to intrude here.”

“There is no fight between our fathers. It is all Uncle Fëanáro’s doing,” Fingon said hotly. His arm finally came away from his face again.

“I will not argue with you on that score.” Privately, Maedhros though that Fingolfin’s studied looks of innocence did a great deal to enflame Fëanor’s anger, but that was not a point he wanted to argue with Fingon today. “No, truly,” he added, when Fingon’s eyebrows protested his disbelief. “But it did make me wonder about family.”

Mollified for the moment, Fingon rolled to his side to better face him. When he laid his head on his outstretched arm, his face was on a level with Maedhros’s: one of the few instances in which Maedhros’s height could not keep their faces at a greater distance.

“Just so you know, I am not actually interested in having this conversation right now, not with all the other things that we could be putting our time to use doing instead. But. I am certain that you will not drop the subject until you have worried at it like a hound with a bone. With just as much grace, I am sure.” Fingon’s sigh tickled Maedhros’s nose. “So.  I will play along for now, and ask that you keep my compliance now in mind when I make suggestions in the future.”

Maedhros could not contain a small smile at the offered compromise. “As if I ever could complain about your idea of a worrisome suggestion.”

Fingon swatted at him lightly. The blow was playful, and barely glanced off his shoulder, but Maedhros could have sworn that he felt the warmth of Fingon’s hand seep through his shirt. “Do you want to distract me? No?” his cousin asked. “Then hush.”

Maedhros would have protested that a smile made no sound, but Fingon had already continued. “What did your father’s latest bullheadedness make you wonder about family?”

Despite his offhanded tone, Maedhros knew that Fingon would truly put the afternoon’s tentative plan on hold to talk if Maedhros but asked him – he had done so before, and all the complaining in Aman had been more for show than for true annoyance. Yet somehow, this very knowledge almost made it harder.

Maedhros opened his mouth to reply, but the words he had spent the morning planning were gone. He turned his eyes from his cousin’s face – frowning, as Fingon realized how serious this question really was to him – and studied the blades of grass waving before his face.

The silence stretched for a few moments before Maedhros said softly: “I wonder, for instance, what the duties of the eldest are.”

“Well.” Beside him he could hear Fingon shift as his tone lightened, probably suspecting that this would be all and he could get back to molesting Maedhros’s clothes again momentarily. “As an eldest son with a new younger brother, let me tell you: the life is hard.” Turgon had just progressed beyond standing unaided, and the young one was now toddling about getting into everything. Hardly a visit passed when Fingon did not have some dire tale to tell of scrolls ripped, clothes wrinkled, or some other horror visited upon his possessions by his new brother’s insatiable curiosity and grasping fingers. “Years, sometimes decades, are spent grooming the parents’ affections, only to have them stolen away by the newest addition to the dinner table – even when that addition brings no skills, no charms, nothing that would truly make them seem any competition. . .”

“Incorrigible brat,” Maedhros muttered, trying to ignore how even in jest Fingon’s examples mirrored so much of what Maedhros himself saw in the conflicts between his father and his uncle. “You forget, or ignore, that I am now up to _four_ younger brothers, and that Atarinkë is enough like Atar that even my status as the eldest cannot long draw Atar’s attention back to me.“

“Oh.” Another shift at his side and the sudden shadow in the grass by his head meant that Fingon had probably rolled to his elbows and was now looking down at him, but Maedhros didn’t glance up to confirm, maintaining the pretense that the blades of grass by his fingers were worth all his concentration. “Nelyo. Are you jealous?”

 _That_ bit of ridiculousness, though, was enough to rip Maedhros’s gaze away from the technically perfect and thus actually quite boring grass. “No, Káno! I am not jealous. At this age Atarinkë needs the attention more than I do, anyway.”

“Nelyo.” Fingon spoke gravely, but the growing twinkle in his eyes readily betrayed his true emotions. “I do believe that this is jealousy speaking. It is a most serious malady, and I can only prescribe the loving attentions-”

“Ugh.”

“Ugh? _Ugh_? That is how ill you judge my attentions?”

“No, that is how ill I judge your attention _span_. I wanted your opinion on a serious question, not an attempt to deflect me every time I near my topic.”

“What else am I to do?” Fingon surged to a seat, crossing his legs and throwing his arms up in disgust. Maedhros cocked his head to the side, watching the beauty that was Fingon and his gesticulations outlined against the soft light of Laurelin. “You dance around the subject as though it were a maypole, and I am still no further to understanding your question or to fulfilling my original object of leaving you mindless with pleasure amidst the glory of Yavanna’s bounty. It is enough to drive one to madness!”

Perhaps it was the fact that Fingon was now farther away – two moves, or one more frustrating answer, from simply standing up, perhaps even walking away – that gave Maedhros the courage to finally voice his true concern.

“What are _my_ duties as the eldest?” Fingon froze, mid-gesture, but Maedhros could not look at him directly, for fear of losing his tenuous snatch of courage. These were questions that had long bothered him, but that he had only recently been able to articulate to himself; even less recently, consider sharing with another.

“There are so many suppositions, and conflicts, and restrictions, that I find myself at a loss, sometimes. For instance, am I to cherish and lead and guide all my siblings and cousins, as the oldest of this next generation of our House?” (He pretended not to hear Fingon’s muttered “To hear Uncle Fëanáro speak of it, there is no House of Finwë in that sense, not anymore.”) “Yet Atar did not: he left and founded his own household with Amme as soon as your father was born. He has provided no guidance for the children of Indis (“o-ho, my atar needs ‘guidance’?” Fingon snorted), and has tried to raise his own children separate, apart from their kin.”

His fingers strayed back to the blades of grass as he continued. “Or perhaps the duty of the eldest is to follow his father? To back his choices, to look to his wisdom, to stand firm at his side where the younger are given the leeway to leave his shadow? But then, again, Atar has not supported his father’s choices.” They both knew what, and whom, Fëanor did not support in Finwë’s life, so Maedhros left it at that.

Fingon made a sound as if he would interrupt here, but Maedhros bulled on, suddenly afraid that these words would never come again if he did not spit them out into the warm, still air while he still had both courage and opportunity.

“Or perhaps it is the duty of the eldest to take and improve on what has gone before him? Perhaps that would explain how I am constantly measured against all those who have come before me in our line, or the fact that I have more ceremonial names than anyone save Manwë himself, or the bickerings over what I am meant to do and how I am meant to spend my days. Yet I cannot help but wonder: what does it mean that I am raised a prince, when our line will never die? I will never actually lead our House, or our people, so why uphold the pretense?”

At his side, Fingon held very still.

After a few tense, silent moments Maedhros sighed. “Please tell me I have not let slip some unforgivable barb at your father’s expense.”

“No, none, though I am sure that something was dying to ram its way out of your utterly Fëanorian mouth,” Fingon said finally. “It’s just that I am surprised at you, Nelyo. Do any of these so-called obligations, or duties, shock you? Of course the eldest must love, and cherish, and lead. Do you actually wonder these things?”

“Mmm.” Maedhros considered that perhaps he had not explained his conundrum as well as he had thought. “No, not in that way, but -”

“If you are bandying about definitions as embodied by Uncle Fëanáro, well, that is different, and I can certainly understand the confusion,” Fingon continued. “But to ask whether you must love? Must look up to those above you, and yet out to those yet to come? Nelyo, that is silly.”

“Perhaps,” Maedhros conceded with a sigh. “If only you were the eldest, your wisdom would surely be enough to save you from asking the stupid, futile questions that you seem to imagine I torture myself with.”

Fingon snorted. “If that venerable position comes with the stick that you have shoved up your arse some days, then no, thank you, I am not interested. But then, too, if I were the eldest of all our generation that would mean that Atar would be first of Finwë’s line, and that is a convoluted mess I am not getting into now. Would Uncle Fëanáro be of ‘the children of Indis’?” Though Fingon kept from making frustrated air marks around the hated epithet, Maedhros could all but hear the gestures in his inflection. “Would Míriel the Broideress, Eru rest her, be the usurping wife? Valar, Nelyo, I do not care to think about what that would mean. Why are we talking about such foolishness again, anyways?”

“See, that is what I meant exactly,“ Maedhros said softly, but it seemed that Fingon was no longer in the mood to listen to genealogical philosophizing, no matter that that was not the point he had intended to carry across today. Instead, as Fingon alit on him with the kiss he had been visibly restraining for most of their impromptu talk, Maedhros wondered whether he was making or seeing specters where there were none. Fingon had the right of it in this at least: of course the eldest must love, and cherish, and lead. Maedhros was not questioning that. Perhaps, then, he was wondering whether it was a duty or a matter of inclination.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Fingon stood in the doorway and clapped a hand over his mouth as he took in the sight before him.

“You look terrible,” Maedhros said hoarsely.

In two strides Fingon had crossed the room and was hovering at his bedside, and for a moment Maedhros was certain that his cousin would throw himself across him. It was not that Maedhros hated the thought, really, so much as that he had not been in such close proximity to anyone who had not wished him pain in a very long time – and moreover, every strand of his body was already aching. Still, he scolded himself, he would welcome even more pain if it meant that Fingon had forgiven him enough to bestow even a scrap of his completely unearned affection on him again.

Instead, though, Fingon simply smoothed out an expanse of the blanket – a gesture of no real use, but also one that betrayed his concerns, not knowing where Maedhros was hurt. The answer was “everywhere,” but Maedhros did not volunteer it.

“I believe that is my line,” Fingon said, finally. His voice had changed so much, Maedhros wondered: it was deeper now, weathered, no longer the voice of his young cousin in Aman, what felt like so long ago.

Somewhat unsettled by all that he suddenly no longer knew about Fingon, Maedhros settled into a routine so old, so utterly alien to his recent circumstances, that he had almost forgotten how to play it. “But I said it first. And you do look terrible. Like you’ve been at another horrible bout of theatrics.”  

Fingon looked like he wanted to make some similarly silly rejoinder, but at the reminder of recent theatrics his expression crumbled and his fist clutched at the scrap of blanket he had just smoothed out seconds before. “Ai, Nelyo. . .”

“Maedhros.” What did the Silvans call this, with their odd agricultural sayings: “nipping it in the bud”? The thought, as far as he understood it, was that the fruit of an unwanted thought could not develop if pruned early, before allowed any space or leeway to blossom. He no longer deserved the riot of life and color that had once been Fingon’s affection and devotion: he had to make it clear that he realized that now.

“Hmm?” His cousin looked up.

“I am called Maedhros, now.” How inadequate a severance that seemed, though. . .

“How grand for you?” Fingon didn’t seem to realize the significance of the new name. How – how very Fingon of him.

“Very grand,” Maedhros said dryly, watching as his cousin realized that he had bunched the blanket up, quickly releasing his fist and beginning to smooth the scrap of cloth out again.

“Mmm, I suppose.” Fingon gave the blanket one last pat before finally looking up and meeting his eyes. Shamefully, Maedhros could not maintain the contact, and looked away painfully under the pretense of coughing. Unfortunately, the cough was all too obliging, and quickly turned into a hack and a dry retch. Fingon grabbed at the blanket in a fist again. “Nelyo, is there something I can do? The healers left a potion of some sort, there is water, or I -”

“Do? You could have left me.”

Maedhros did not even have to look to know that the fist in his blankets was balling tighter and tighter, that his cousin’s knuckles were blanching from the strain. The last he had seen them, they had also been covered in blood – his blood – and he had begged for surcease. . .

“You know I could not.” Fingon’s whisper slid out into the tense silence.

“I know nothing of the kind. It would have been better for all involved. Let my brothers have hope; let Moringotto lose hope, or whatever sad farce of that emotion he maintains; let my spirit join my father’s as is its due, in the Dark we have invoked for ourselves.”

From the corner of his gaze, he could see Fingon’s knuckles bunch and strain further, as if a tighter fist in the blanket would forestall his words, and could even hold Maedhros here too.

“No.” Fingon’s voice was quiet, but gathered volume and strength with impressive speed. “No, Nelyo. I did not come all this way, from Aman and on into Angband, just for you to whine and show your throat in self-pity!”

Something about the pronunciation of “all this way” made Maedhros shift back towards him, trying and failing to leverage himself upright for what promised to be a delightful conversation. “You – you. . . Findekáno.  You never said. How were you able to cross into this land?”

With horror, he recalled the last time he had seen the gathered people of Nolofinwë: stranded, as they all had been, on the northernmost shores of Aman, peering out into the dark, deathly chill of the Helcaraxë. The surviving swanships, bobbing blotches of white in the rare patches of frigid water, had only been discernible from the towering ice structures by the splotches of blood that still marred their sides. How had Fingon survived, let alone made the crossing?

“The crossing?” Even Fingon’s laugh had changed, hoarser and harsher, though Maedhros promised himself that he could still hear the pealing bells he had once loved, buried somewhere beneath those hard tones. “Why, Nelyo, did you fear that we had trudged all the way back to Alqualondë, to spit in the eyes of the Telerin widows and orphans as we stole their fishing boats this time?” Maedhros didn’t stir. An uneasy bargain with the surviving Teleri _had_ been his first guess – another Kinslaying, a close and uneasy second. But no, it could not have been. Otherwise Fingon would hardly be laughing, even with this new and wild sound. . .

“Would that we had had so _kind_ an option, if ‘kind’ is a word we are still bandying about in these dark days.” Fingon’s voice settled back into its grim new register as he shook his head. “But no, to settle your oh-so-solicitous concerns for the state of my spirit – no, Nelyo. We killed no more innocents, we spilled no more blood – well, none that was not our own, at least. You would have to ask Turukáno to clarify on that score, sometime, though I would recommend standing out of his reach if you do. We came across the Helcaraxë, instead.”  

It was as if his heart had stuttered and stopped, Maedhros thought. “The- the Grinding Ice? You _walked_?”

“Oh, my apologies.” Fingon inclined his head in mocking apology. “I am told that sometimes I stutter, now – something about the muscles acting up, after the cold they’ve endured. Forgive me, and try to bear the repetition: Nelyafinwë, I stumbled across the hellish deathtrap that is the Helcaraxë. I wore out the yellow dancing boots you loved – well, orange-ish, by that point, what with all the blood I’d waded through – tripping through ice cold enough to freeze blood, sharp enough to cut bone, if you were stupid enough to lean against it, and thus contract a slightly longer and more painful death than if you simply had the misfortune to fall through to the Sea instead. Again, check with Turukáno sometime.”

Fingon paused for breath, and Maedhros would have sworn – no, this was a good oath, he was justified in this oath – that his younger cousin looked like one of the Maiar in his righteous fury. “And I did all this in order to come here and _find_ you, and _shake_ your sorry arse for swearing your father’s sorrier oath and leaving our people dead and stranded in your disastrous wake!”

But his fury didn’t last long, and before Maedhros’s eyes, the incandescent Fingon deflated into the crumpled shoulders of a friend who had been hurt, and betrayed, and still didn’t understand why. “But then, after the triumph of _actually surviving_ what must have been a slice of the Void on Arda, and pissing on Moringotto’s gate as we did, I found out that you weren’t here. Your people, your own brothers, had given you up for dead, and were rooted in place where they had lost so much.”

There was not much tighter that his fist could grip the blanket, and when Fingon’s eyes met his this time, Maedhros could not look away. What was there to be said in the face of such unneeded horror, such misplaced devotion? He decided that he hadn’t really needed an explanation for Fingon’s new, harder face and voice if this was what he was to learn. . .

Unfortunately, he could not quite articulate his anguish in such assuring terms. “But, Káno, you were meant to be safe!”

And just like that, the Maia-like fury was back.

“I did not need to be _saved_ , Nelyo!” Fingon’s shout made Maedhros wince, and he could hear the healers shouting in alarm somewhere beyond the tiny room. “To retain even a _scrap_ of legitimacy, your pissing complex about being the eldest should have kicked in, oh, at least five days earlier! In time to save your brothers, and yourself, from Fëanáro’s madness! To establish yourself as a leveler head, someone for your people to look to, instead of him!”

There was no arguing with either the logic or the volume, and as healers swarmed the room, grabbing at Fingon’s arms and pleading for the kind prince to please leave their sovereign to rest, Maedhros was left with a memory stunning in its vividness: standing aside, watching the swanships burn, and hoping that if that hellish light carried across the Sea, then at least Fingon would know he faced only the stinging necessity of apologizing to the Valar, rather than the certain fatality of trying to fight Moringotto.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“It _will_ succeed.” Fingon took a sip of wine as he made this proclamation with more faith than Maedhros thought that all of their maps and battle plans and pins denoting armies really warranted. “This offensive will bring us all the victories we have worked toward for so long – the Silmarils regained, the Oath fulfilled, our allies mollified, the Valar astounded, my thrice-damned counselors no longer required. Oh, and victory beddings. For select of my allies.” This last was likely followed by a salacious wink, but Maedhros was not actually looking at his king as he spoke.

“Mmm.”

“Is that all you have to say for yourself?” Fingon demanded. He set his goblet down and swept his robes to the side, standing in a rush of cloth and sweeping down the dais to join Maedhros at the lower table. The hall had emptied by this point, leaving them alone with the dying fire and what half-emptied jugs still remained of the wine that had initially accompanied the recent strategy meeting.

Maedhros remained unsure whether that emptying was a positive event or not. For one, it left him completely at Fingon’s disposal. For another – well, it left him completely at Fingon’s disposal.

And Fingon was entirely too optimistic about the outcome of this latest venture – the Union of Maedhros, as he had taken to calling it.

“You are entirely too optimistic about this venture, and naming it after me is likely the reason that you have only negligible resources from Nargothrond and Doriath – neither of which have cause, lately, to be overly fond of Fëanorian.”

“I didn’t name it anything, you ridiculous creature,” Fingon said fondly, laying his head against Maedhros’s shoulder and rubbing his forehead back and forth against the rough cloth as if trying to imprint himself there. “For one thing, names are not always assigned with the intention of great portent. And for another, I rather think this particular name sprang up in the messes somewhere. You know how soldiers get.”

“I do?” Maedhros asked, amused despite himself, but Fingon ignored this and plowed on.

“Someone from Nargothrond was probably complaining to someone from the Havens that he would never fight under the blasted Fëanorian star-“

“Very likely,” Maedhros agreed.

“Hush, now. I’m concocting a plausible scenario to try and reduce your anxiety here.” Fingon lifted his head and began tracing the seams of Maedhros’s ceremonial cloak. “And then the someone from the Havens said, eh, there’s one of them that can be reasoned with, he got all the brains in the family, and the someone from Nargothrond replied, but-“

“I am beginning to lose the thread here,” Maedhros chided. “And here,” he complained, catching at Fingon’s hands and pushing them away from his shoulder.

“As if I would ruin your clothes _here_ ,” Fingon snorted. Maedhros fought, and failed, to restrain a small groan. “But, as I was saying-“

“You didn’t name it, I didn’t name it, we don’t know who named it, and we don’t know why the name has been universally adopted when all anyone seems able to do is moan about how inaccurate and insulting it is,” Maedhros summarized, following Fingon over toward the fire on the opposite end of the room.

“Well, that complaint is probably the one thing that everyone actually agrees on, never mind our strategy or even our cause, so you are already proving a unifying factor,” Fingon mused, ignoring the cushioned seats set at a short distance around the fire and electing to simply drop to the stones right in front of it. Maedhros watched him stretch languorously before crossing his legs and patting the hearth next to him.

“As my king commands,” he murmured, kneeling slightly behind Fingon.

“Why?” Fingon moaned. “Now I must strain my neck to even have a chance of looking at your ridiculous face. Why will you not simply sit with me?

_Because I am restless. Because I have had terrible premonitions about the upcoming battle. Because anything I would say now is not to be said without an easy avenue of escape open to either of us. . ._

None of this was actually said aloud, though. “Because if you will not take the comfortable seats that are actually intended for your kingly posterior, I will not subject mine to the stones that you seem to find comfortable instead.”

Fingon cocked an eyebrow up at him as he indeed craned his neck to meet Maedhros’s eyes. “You do realize that you have given me quite an opening with which I could make all kinds of jokes about ‘stones.’ ”

“Mmm.” Maedhros shifted. “You do realize that I have given you quite an opening several times before, too.”

He decided that Fingon’s laugh was still one of the best and brightest things in the world, deepened and changed as it had become.

“You flatter yourself. But then, you always have.” Fingon shook his head.

“Not always.”

“No, not always,” Fingon agreed, turning to look at him again. “Right now, for instance, I suspect that you are running through horrible nebulous predictions about why the Union is doomed from the start, since it is named for you.”

“Why would I be at all concerned about a venture that could rid Beleriand, and indeed Arda, of its greatest enemy?”

Fingon’s eyebrows raised, unimpressed.

“Fine. I am – _uneasy_ that something of this much import is being named for me. We are all looking to you to lead us – you are the High King, now.”

“Am I?” Fingon asked, musingly. “Well, I never. How kind of you to inform me, I certainly would have not have known otherwise.”

Ignoring him, Maedhros continued: “And it will not do that the deed for which you will be most remembered in song is burdened – unneeded, and unearned – by the darkened name of a disgraced kinsman.” 

“Hmm.” For a time it seemed that Fingon would not grace this claim with an answer, and Maedhros knelt behind his king in silence, brushing his left hand lovingly through the messy plaits of black hair.

So when Fingon did speak again, Maedhros startled.

“Oddly, I always imagined I would be remembered for my valiant rescue of a beloved kinsman more than – ow! Nelyo! That is more your preference than mine, dear heart. Besides. Do you remember, once, back ho- in Aman, that you asked me what I thought of the duties of the eldest?”

Maedhros immediately murmured a contrite apology and set to petting the tugged braids back into some semblance of order. “If I claim I do not, will I be spared an interminable lecture on how now is the time to make good on those concerns and set them to rest?”

Fingon snorted. “Is it too much to ask for a straightforward answer from you? Every once in a month or so? No, do not answer that. I refuse to be distracted by your plaintive distortions of logic.” He settled in a little more comfortably, and although his eyes were fixed on the flames before him, Maedhros had no doubt that his cousin was paying more attention to him than to the fire.

“Having now led my people, and my brothers – and yours, for that matter – I think I am slightly more qualified to answer those questions that I was when you first posed them to me. No, don’t scoff at me – of course it sounds self-evident, but then we could also say that you are more now qualified to be asking them in the first place too.”

Seemingly satisfied that Maedhros would now let him speak uninterrupted, Fingon continued, “At this point, I would love – dearly love – to claim that I can see your actual concern.  Not the one you half-arsed your way through _then_ , but the one we have both experienced _now_ : balancing all the various demands on your shoulders as the eldest, for instance the demand to comfort and guide your own with the necessity of making your own father feel that you still need his comfort and guidance.”  

If Maedhros’s hand dug a little harder into his hair at that, Fingon was kind enough not to mention it.

“Though I do wonder if even that is what you were actually asking me, that day, or indeed any time we have tried and failed to have this conversation since,” Fingon continued conversationally. “What with all that talk of wanting me to be the eldest in your place.”

Maedhros swallowed around a silly lump that had somehow appeared in his throat. “As you reminded me then, that shift would entail switching the roles of Míriel and Indis, or of assuming my Atar’s birth-rank differed, or –“

“No, I think it does not,” Fingon said quietly. His hands rose and caught at Maedhros’s one, stilling it for a moment before pulling it gently out of Fingon’s hair. With the same slow, deliberate movements, Fingon then let go, and twisting, rose to his own knees so that he was facing Maedhros. “I think that what you have truly been asking me, all these years, is whether the eldest – and the clamorous, conflicting, often imagined obligations thereof – is all that you are.”

“You make it sound so simple,” Maedhros said softly.

“And you make me an answer that is no answer. Cleverly done, as always.” Fingon shifted. “My knees will kill me if I remain here – Valar only know how you manage, silly thing.”

 _Because I must_ , Maedhros did not say. He remained kneeling, and looked up at Fingon as his cousin rose. “That is because I have none. Answer, that is. Even now, when I have irresponsibly abdicated so much of my responsibility on to your able shoulders, I cannot fulfill all that was asked of me as the eldest of our line. I have nothing to offer in my balance.” He sighed, and began to lean forward.

Fingon stopped him with a hand on his forehead and a fond roll of his eyes. “As tempting as it is to let you continue along that particular trajectory, we are riding out to the main encampment tomorrow, and the battlefield from there – you must have your rest, and so must I. We will pick this up again, afterwards, and I will convince you just how much I know you have done to accomplish in being the eldest.”

“If you insist.” He was tired, so tired, of always wondering whether he had done, or ever could do, enough.  

“I do,” Fingon repeated, and it was impossible not to trust him when he sounded so assured. So Maedhros did.

 

**Author's Note:**

> For all my lurking in the Silmarillion fandom, this is my first completed fanfic for it. It's also the first fic I've written in *checks watch* about six years, though I've RP'd Maedhros a bit since then. 
> 
> I guess what I'm trying to say is - hi? Nice to be here, I hope I haven't messed anything up too egregiously? (you can always come yell at me [on tumblr](http://raisingcain-onceagain.tumblr.com/) if I have)


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